The Progress of a Crime

by Julian Symons

  Now, after consideration, Paul replied, “I shouldn’t say friends. Acquaintances.”

  “They don’t sound like the sort of boys your mother and I would welcome as your friends.” Paul said nothing to this. “You were playing with them this afternoon?”

  It was all wrong, Brad felt, that he should have to drag the information out of Paul by asking questions. A boy and his father should exchange confidences easily and naturally, but it had never been like that with them.

  By direct questioning, of the kind that he felt shouldn’t be necessary, he learned that they had been playing football. When they had finished these three boys walked back with Paul to The Oasis. On the way Paul had bought the sweets. Why had they walked back? he asked. Surely they didn’t live in Dunkerley Green? Paul shook his head.

  “They live in Denholm.”

  Brad carefully avoided comment. Denholm was a part of the city that he had visited only two or three times in his life. It contained the docks and a good many factories, and also several streets of dubious reputation.

  It would have been against Brad’s principles to say that he did not want his son going about with boys from Denholm. Instead, he asked, “Why did they come up here with you? I don’t understand that.” Paul muttered something, and Brad repeated rather sharply, “Why, Paul, why?”

  Paul raised his head and looked his father straight in the face. “John, said, ‘Let’s have another look at Snob Hill.’”

  “Snob Hill,” Brad echoed. “That’s what they call The Oasis?”

  “Yes. He said, ‘Let’s see if they’ve put barbed wire round it yet.’”

  “Barbed wire?”

  “To keep them out.”

  Brad felt something—something that might have been a tiny bird—leap inside his stomach. With intentional brutality he went on, “You live here. On Snob Hill. I’m surprised they have anything to do with you.”

  Paul muttered again, so that the words were only just audible.

  “They think I’m okay.”

  Brad gripped his son’s shoulder, felt the fine bones beneath his hand. “You think it’s all right for them to throw stones, to break windows?”

  “Of course I don’t.”

  “This John, what’s his last name?”

  “Baxter.”

  “Where does he live?”

  “I don’t know.” Paul hesitated, then said, “I expect he’ll be in The Club.”

  “The Club?”

  “They go there most nights.”

  “Where is it?”

  “East Street.”

  A horrifying thought occurred to Brad. “Have you been there?”

  “They say I’m too young.” Paul stopped, then said, “Dad.”

  “Yes?”

  “I shouldn’t go there. It won’t do any good.” With an effort, as though he were explaining, saying something that made sense, he added, “You won’t like it.”

  In the time that it took to drive to Denholm, the bird that had been fluttering in Brad’s stomach had quieted down. He was, as he often said, a liberal with a small “l”. He believed that there was no problem which could not be solved by discussion round a table, and that you should always make an effort to see the other fellow’s point of view.

  The trip by car gave him time to think about his own attitude, and to admit that he had been a bit unreasonable. He could understand that these boys held a sort of glamour for Paul, could even understand to a certain extent their feelings about The Oasis. And just because he understood, it would be silly, it would even be cowardly, not to face them and talk to them.

  Much of Denholm was dark, but East Street blazed with neon light. There seemed to be a dozen clubs of various kinds, as well as several cafes, and he had to ask for The Club. He did so at first without success, then a boy giggled and said that he was standing almost in front of it.

  As Brad descended steps to a basement and advanced towards a wall of syncopated sound, he felt for the first time a doubt about the wisdom of his mission.

  The door was open, and he entered a low-ceilinged cellar room. At the far end of it four boys were singing or shouting on a raised platform. In front of him couples moved, most of them not holding each other, but gyrating in strange contortions that he had never seen before except in one or two television programmes.

  The atmosphere was remarkably clear. Well, at least most of them are non-smokers, he thought, and was pleased that he hadn’t lost his sense of humour. He spoke to a boy who was standing by a wall.

  “Can you tell me where to find John Baxter?”

  The boy stared at him, and Brad repeated the question.

  “John?” The boy gave Brad a long deliberate look, from face to shoes. Then somebody tapped Brad’s shoulder from behind. He turned to face a fat boy wearing a purple shirt, jeans, and elastic-sided shoes.

  The fat boy muttered something lewd.

  His other shoulder was tapped. A boy with bad teeth grinned at him. “You want the john?”

  The first boy, not the fat one, tapped him, repeating the lewd remark.

  The fat boy tapped him again. “It’s just looking at you. This way.” He walked slowly round Brad, staring at him. “’Cause we never seen nothing so square before, get it?”

  As Brad looked at the clothes of the three boys around him, clothes that were different in several ways and yet were identical in the brightness of their shirts, the tightness of their jeans, and the pointedness of their shoes, he had the ridiculous feeling that it was he and not they who was outraging orthodoxy, that his neat dark suit and well-polished square-toed shoes were badges of singularity, the clothing of an outlaw.

  The sensation lasted for only a moment. Then he shouted—he had to shout, because the tribal music rose suddenly to a louder beat—“I want John Baxter.”

  The boy with the bad teeth tapped him. “You ask for the john, then you don’t pay attention. I don’t like that, not polite. I’m John.”

  Brad faced him. “You are? You’re the John who—”

  The fat boy said, “You heard that, he said you’re the john. You going to take that?”

  The three of them had closed in so that they were now almost touching him, and he thought incredulously: they’re going to attack me. Then a voice said, “Break it up, come on now, break it up.”

  The three boys moved back, and a stocky man with thick eyebrows and arms like marrows said, “Whatcher want?” Brad found it hard to speak. The man went on, “They’re blocked. You don’t want to get mixed up with ’em when they’re blocked.”

  “Blocked?” It was a new country, a new language.

  “I’m here if there’s trouble, but they’re no trouble—it’s you that’s making trouble, mister.”

  “I didn’t—that’s not true.”

  “So they’re blocked, they feel good, have fun, what’s the harm? You don’t belong, mister. They don’t like you, so why don’t you just get out?”

  He could just hear himself say all right, all right. Then there was a small scream from the dance floor, and a girl cried, “He hit me!” The bouncer began to push his way through the crowd on the dance floor.

  Brad stumbled away, eager to go, and had almost reached the outer door when there was one more tap on his shoulder. He turned again, putting up his fists. A tall dark boy he had not seen before asked, “Want me?”

  The boy was dressed like the others, but there was something different about him—a kind of authority and even arrogance.

  “You’re John Baxter?”

  “What do you want?”

  Behind him was the fat boy who said now, with a hint of silly irrational laughter in his voice, “He says he wants John, see, so we’re—”

  “Shut it, Fatty,” the dark boy said. The fat boy stopped talking.

  “I’m Bradley Fawcett.”

>   “Should I care?”

  “I’m the father of the boy—” He stopped, began again. “You threw a stone and broke our window.”

  “I did?” The boy sounded politely surprised. “Can you prove it?”

  “You did it, isn’t that so? My wife would recognise you.”

  “I tell you what,” the dark boy said. “You got a suspicious mind. You don’t want to go around saying things like that—might get you into trouble.”

  A fair-haired girl came up, pulled at the tall dark boy’s arm. “Come on, John.”

  “Later, Jean. Busy.” He did not stop looking at Brad.

  In Brad’s stomach the bird was fluttering again, a bird of anger. He said carefully, “I believe you call the place where I live Snob Hill—”

  The boy laughed. “It’s a good name for it.”

  “I’ve come to warn you and your friends to keep away from it. And keep away from my son.”

  Fatty crowed in a falsetto voice, “Don’t touch my darling boy.”

  “Do I make myself clear?”

  “John,” the girl said. “Don’t let’s have any trouble. Please.”

  The tall dark boy looked Brad up and down. Then smiled. “We do what we like. It’s a free country, they say, and if we want to come up to Snob Hill, see your son, we do it. But I’ll tell you what—we’d like to make you happy. If you haven’t got the money to pay for the window—” Brad raised a hand in protest, but it was ignored “—we’ll have a whip round in The Club here. How’s that?”

  He laughed, and behind him came the sound of other laughter, sycophantic and foolish. They were all laughing at Brad, and it was hard now to control the bird that leaped inside him. He would have liked to smash the sneering face in front of him with his fist.

  But what he did in fact was to run up the steps to the street, get into his car, slam it into gear, and drive hurriedly away. It was as though some fury were pursuing him; but there was no fury, nothing worse than the sound—which he continued to hear in his ears during most of the drive home—of that mocking laughter.

  When he opened the living-room door their faces were all turned to him—Porky’s, Geoff’s, Peter’s, eager and expectant. He stared at the three of them with a kind of hostility, even though they were his friends. Geoff was their spokesman.

  “We were talking again, Brad, about that idea.”

  “Idea?” He went over and poured whisky.

  “The Residents’ Committee. We all think it’s pretty good, something we should have done a long while ago. We came to ask if you’d let us nominate you for chairman.”

  “Brad!” That was Miriam, who had come in from the kitchen with coffee on a tray. “Whatever are you doing?”

  “What?” Then he realised that he had poured whisky for himself without offering it to his guests. He said, “Sorry,” and filled their glasses. Porky was watching him with the ironical gaze.

  “Hear you bearded the tigers on your own, Brad. How did it go?”

  Miriam asked in a high voice, “Did you see them? Are they going to pay for the window?”

  “I saw them. They’re louts, hooligans.”

  “Of course they are,” Peter fluted.

  “I told them some home truths, but it’s impossible to talk to them. They—” But he found that he could not go into the humiliating details. “They’ve got a kind of club. I saw them there, and I met the ringleader. I shall go to the police to-morrow morning.”

  Porky stared at him, but said nothing. Geoff threw up his hands. “You won’t get anywhere with the police.”

  Miriam came over to him. “They will do something? Surely we’ve got a right to protection. We don’t have to let them do what they like, do we? They frighten me, Bradley.”

  “The best form of protection is self-protection,” Porky said, and expanded on it. “We’ve got the nucleus of a Residents’ Committee right here. We can easily get another dozen to join us, mount guard at night, look after our own properties. And if we find these tigers, we’ll know how to deal with them.”

  Miriam looked at Brad inquiringly. It seemed to him that they all waited on his judgement. Just for a moment a picture came into his mind—the picture of a tiger with the dark sneering face of John Baxter, a tiger being hunted through the gardens of The Oasis. Then the picture vanished as though a shutter had been placed over it. What was all this nonsense about tigers?

  Brad Fawcett, a liberal with a small “l,” began to speak.

  “I think we should be extremely careful about this. I’m not saying it isn’t a good idea; I think it is, and I’m inclined to agree that it should have been set up long ago. But I do say we ought to think more carefully about ways and means. There are lots of aspects to it, but essentially it’s a community project, and since you’ve been good enough to come to me, may I suggest that the first step is to sound out our fellow residents and see how many of them like the idea…”

  As he went on he found that verbalisation brought him self-assurance, as it did when he got up to speak as chairman of the Rotary Club. He was not disturbed by the unwinking stare of Porky’s little eyes, and if Geoff Cooper looked bored and Peter Stone disappointed, he pretended not to notice it.

  They talked for another half hour and drank some more whisky, and by the time the others said good night, see you on the 9:12, the recollection of the visit to Denholm had become no more than a faint disturbance inside him, like indigestion. It did not become urgent again even when Miriam, gripping him tightly in bed, whispered, “You will go to the police in the morning, won’t you?”

  Sleepily he said that he would—before he caught his train.

  At 11:30 the following morning he was preparing with his secretary, Miss Hornsby, an intricate schedule for a conference to begin at noon. The conference was about the installation of new boilers, and his mind was full of maintenance costs when he picked up the telephone.

  Miriam’s voice asked, “What did they say?”

  For a moment he did not know what she was talking about, so utterly had he shut away that unsatisfactory interview at the police station. Then he remembered.

  “The police? They seemed to think we were making a mountain out of a molehill. Perhaps they were right.”

  “But what did they say?”

  “They said if we could identify the boy who broke the window—”

  “We can,” she said triumphantly. “Paul can. He knows them.”

  “They explained that it would mean Paul being the chief witness. He would be examined, perhaps cross-examined, in court. We don’t want that, do we?”

  In her high voice she said, “I suppose not.”

  “Of course we don’t. At the moment he’s taken it quite calmly. I can’t think of anything worse than dragging him through the courts.”

  “No.” There was silence. Miss Hornsby raised her eyebrows, pointed at her watch. With the note of hysteria in her voice, Miriam said, “I’m sorry to bother you—”

  “It’s all right. I should have phoned you, but I’ve had a lot of work piled up, still have.”

  “Isn’t there anything the police can do?”

  “I’ve told you what they said.” He was patient; he kept the irritation out of his voice. “We’ll talk about it later.”

  “What time will you be home? Can you come home early?”

  Still patiently, speaking as though to a child, he said, “I have to go into conference at noon, and I don’t know when I shall be free. I won’t be able to take any phone calls. Pull yourself together, Miriam, and stop worrying.”

  As he put down the receiver he saw Miss Hornsby’s eyes fixed speculatively on him. He felt guilty, but what had he said that was wrong or untrue? Paul had been tremendously cheerful at breakfast, and had gone off in high spirits. As for the police, the Sergeant had as good as said they had more important crimes to worry abo
ut than a broken window. Brad sighed, and returned to the schedule.

  He came out of the conference six hours later, feeling tight and tense all over. The client had queried almost everything in the estimate, from the siting of the boilers to the cost of the material used for lining them. He had finally agreed to revise the whole plan. Miss Hornsby had sat in, making notes, but when he got back to his room her assistant, a scared-looking girl, came in.

  “Your wife telephoned, Mr. Fawcett. Three times. She said it was very important, but you’d said nothing at all must be put through, so—”

  “All right. Get her for me.”

  “I hope I did right.”

  “Just get her for me, will you?”

  Half a minute later Miriam’s voice, in his ear, was crying, “They’ve got him, they’ve got him, Bradley—he’s gone!”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Paul. He’s not come home from school. He’s an hour and a half late.”

  “Have you called the school?”

  “Oh, yes, yes,” she cried, as though eager to get as quickly as possible through all such silly questions and force on him realisation of what had happened. “I’ve spoken to them. He left at the usual time. I’ve been down to the common, he hasn’t been there, I’ve done everything. Don’t you see, Bradley, those boys have taken him. After you went to see them last night, this is their—their revenge.”

  He saw again John Baxter’s face, dark and sneering; he remembered the things that had been said in The Club; he knew that the words she spoke were true. Heavily he said, “Yes. Leave it to me.”

  “Bradley, what are they doing to my little boy?”

  “He’s my boy too,” he said. “I’ll get him back. Leave it to me.”

  When he had hung up he sat for a moment, and felt the bird leaping in his belly again. You try to treat them decently, he thought, you try to be reasonable and discuss things with them, and this is what you get. They are like animals, and you have to treat them like animals. He dialled Porky Leighton’s number.